138 I . I " P EOPLE OF THE ;.:tf 1 r l DEER " b y F ar- It.> l IlL I ' , ik'" r ley Mowat (Atlan- . I .I j . i' tic-Little, Brown), is L{I 'IIII a book about the in- - 11 I. land Eskimos of the Barrens-the half- million square miles of plains, lakes, and low hills west of Hudson Bay. It is a record of two years the author spent among one tribe of these peo- ple-the Ihalmiut-in the late nine- teen-forties, and in that sense is a travel book. But it is more, too, because Mr. Mowat is somethIng of a fanatic about the tribe-or what is left of it after twenty years of slow starvation. His book is another contribution to the growing literature that employs a new approach in evaluating primitive men and cultures, one that quite properly avoids judging aboriginal societies by standards and ethical codes of higher- "-' or at least different-civilizations. Mr. Mowat is a young Canadian who was first seized wIth the arctic fever in 1935, when, at the age of fifteen, he spent a summer vacation at Churchill, on the southern end of Hudson Bay. On that trip, while riding in the caboose of a Hudson Bay Rail- way train, he saw what he calls "perhaps the most tremendous living spectacle h . k " t at our contInent nows -a mass migration of caribou, moving in im- mense herds from the forests of Mani- toba to the frozen plains of the MacKenzie District. He was so stirred bv the sight of this seemingly endless brown river of reindeer half a mile wide that flowed imperturbably across the roadbed of the halted train that he never got over it. Some time later, when he heard that a tribe of Eskimos in the subarctic wastes lived off the deer and made their camps in the paths of the great migrations, he resolved to go back north one day and find them. It was not untIl after he had put In a dozen years at school and at war that he was able to. In the sprIng of 1947, he set out for Churchill, equipped with only a few necessities, such as a sleeping bag and some old Army clothes, and practically no plans. He did not know where to find the deer people-the traders, Eskimos, and trap- pers of the Hudson Bay coast knew of them merely by hearsay, and the au- thoritative information he had concern- ing them was a meagre report, dated 1896, by the first, and last, white man ever to visit their central homeland. BOOKS Two from r"'p North There was even some doubt that the tribe still existed. In Churchill, he met a former Royal Air Force pilot who was running a one-man, one-plane tramp airline, and talked him into fly- ing him three hundred and fiftJ miles in to the Barrens, to the ruins of an old trading post where the deer people had once come to barter furs for food and ammunition. Moving on alone from there, he found the Ihalmiut. "P eople of the Deer" is a complete amateur anthropology. It is probably a definitive one, too, for the Ihalmiut are at the end of their tether. In 1900, Mowat says, thousands of them roamed the Barrens and prospered off the deer; today, there are less than forty left, among them only two women able to bear children Until the first white traders came to the fringes of their territory, the Ihalmiut lived as they had since the Stone Age. Four times a year, :=J - - k c:9 \) \ C- \ <.... -A / when the caribou migrated, the men of the tribe intercepted the hordes at select- ed passes and fords and slaughtered them with bows and spears. They were always able to kill enough deer to supply the tribe with food and material for '- clothing and tents until the next migra- tion. When the traders started edging into the Barrens, they wanted fox pelts. They gave the Ihalmiut rifles and am- munition and persuaded them to shoot the arctic fox, and in exchange for the pelts gave them more ammunition and food-not meat, whIch had been the tribe's sole diet from earliest times, but white flour, sugar, lard, and baking powder. Eventually, the old bow-and- spear hunters died off and the young Ihalmiut began to depend entirely on the rifle, because it was far more effec- tive than their primitive traditional weapons. Around the end of the nine- teen-twenties, the world market for -- 0M